Operations management and corporate entrepreneurship: The moderating effect of operations control on the antecedents of corporate entrepreneurial activity in relation to innovation performance

Abstract

a b s t r a c tResearch on the topic of corporate entrepreneurship has expanded steadily over the last few decades, in large part due to the increasingly recognized linkages between product-market and technological innovation (i.e., consequences of corporate entrepreneurial activity) and firm success. Likewise, growing evidence suggests that effective operations control is a common quality of successful firms. On the surface the two phenomena-corporate entrepreneurship and operations control-may seem to be inherently at odds. That is, corporate entrepreneurship is aimed at taking the firm in new directions, while operations control is aimed at channeling and often restricting actions. As such, it would be useful to know how operations control variables act in concert with the determinants of corporate entrepreneurial activity to promote the innovation outcomes that facilitate long-term organizational success. In this study of 177 firms operating in a wide variety of industries, we investigate the effect on innovation performance of several commonly-acknowledged antecedents of corporate entrepreneurship, as measured by the Corporate Entrepreneurship Assessment Instrument (e.g., Hornsby et al., 2008Hornsby et al., , 2002; namely, management support, work discretion/autonomy, rewards/reinforcements, time availability, and organizational boundaries. More importantly, we examine the moderating effects of operations control variablesspecifically risk control and process control formality -on the relationships between the antecedents of corporate entrepreneurship and innovation performance. Results indicate that only two of the five antecedents to corporate entrepreneurship have main effects on innovation performance with moderate significance. However, each of the five antecedents significantly interacts with one or both of the operations control variables and, thereby, influences innovation performance. The implications of these results in relation to operations management and corporate entrepreneurship theory and practice are discussed.

Achieving strategic renewal: the multi-level influences of top and middle managers’ boundary-spanning

“…Our findings show that the positive direct effect of TMT boundary-spanning on exploratory innovation is offset by the concomitant impact on MMs' role conflict, which relates negatively to exploratory innovation. These results highlight the idea that TMT boundaryspanning may also add pressure on MMs who already possess a demanding role (Floyd and Lane 2000; (Goodale et al 2011), like the one the focal firm developed in response to a changing business and regulatory environment. Perceived obligations originating from the TMT are especially strong in face of the tensions that arise when striving for strategic renewal against the backdrop of ongoing unit operations.…”

Relationship between Entropy, Corporate Entrepreneurship and Organizational Capabilities in Romanian Medium Sized Enterprises

“…Entrepreneur functional background is a dummy variable, with 1 indicating that entrepreneurs having a background mainly in the backend and 0 referring to entrepreneurs with a background in the customer end [54]. We measured company age as the logarithm of the number of years of operation by the company and company size as the logarithm of the number of employees [55,56]. We apply the industry categorization method used by National Bureau of Statistics of Romania and include six dummy variables to refer to six industries, namely manufacturing, transportation and warehousing, information service and software, finance, real estate, and scientific research and technological service, with the rest combined as the comparison group.…”

"Want to be Entrepreneurial, you need to be APRIC: A Sand Cone Model of Entrepreneurial Orientation"

“…Burgelman (1983) argues that the bottom-up process of "autonomous strategic initiatives" is the driving force behind corporate entrepreneurship, and more recent work by Lumpkin et al (2009;p48) suggest that that "autonomy is an antecedent of entrepreneurial behaviour". Furthermore, on the interface of operations management and entrepreneurship, Goodale et al (2011) suggest that "entrepreneurial opportunities are often best recognized by those with discretion over how to perform their work" (p119). In this way, autonomy is the extent to which decisionmaking latitude and freedom from oversight is provided.…”